So here are two facts about Latin American literature:
1. Carlos Fuentes is one of the major Latin American modernists.
2. Roberto Bolaño has been declared by many as the heir to the modernist Latin American tradition.
Now here's the interesting part: I have recently read novels by each writer that are strikingly similar. Both are jumbled, guilt-ridden stories told as first-person deathbed confessions by politically corrupt, elite members of each author's home country. (Certain readers will already be recalling that Gabriel Garcia Marquez has written his own deathbed confession–based novel.)
What's going on here? is this just a coincidence, or is there a reason that Bolaño and Fuentes have written similar books? I think the latter. Both authors are writing about bad, bad people, and by structuring the novel as a deathbed confession, the protagonists are automatically morally compromised from the get-go; they're being denied the consolation of a peaceful death, and we know that they're going to die unhappy, aware that their lives are not vindicated. Yet telling the story from their perspective also forces us--and the authors--to empathize with these men. Fuentes and Bolaño are using this form to condemn, but also, more importantly, to try and comprehend.
But although these books look very similar, there are some important differences. Let's talk about Fuentes's book first.
The Death of Artemio Cruz is primarily a political beast that is meant to capture an extensive piece of Mexico's history in the mind of one man, Artemio Cruz, who lies helpless on his deathbed, remembering the turning points that brought him to this point. His story is one of a social climber who rose in one of the few ways offered at the point in Mexican history: As a young man, Cruz fought in the Mexican Revolution, attaining a rank of colonel and eventually betraying another revolutionary, returning to his home, taking his father's land, and marrying his sister. After that Cruz goes on to use his wealth to establish political connections and become a powerful, wealthy cog in Mexico's corrupt, semi-dictatorial government.
To Fuentes's credit, Cruz isn't simply a device for relating Mexico's history. The things Cruz thinks about are believable as things a corrupt bureaucrat would be agonizing over as he died. For instance, Cruz doesn't just remember fighting in the Mexican Revolution so that Fuentes can describe the Revolution at length. No, he remembers it because his one true love died in it (with lifelong echoes in his marriage and his womanizing) and because it allowed him to overcome his natural distaste for immoral behavior and take the first steps toward his future life. Though the book is history-told-as-a-novel, it's also a compelling portrait of a man's life.
Stylistically, Fuentes deploys a suite of modernist tricks that, collectively, put the onus on the reader to help create meaning. This is difficult modernism at its best. One chapter is narrated in parallel--there's several strands of narration taking place, but they give in to one another with virtually no warning, leaving you to assign owners to thought fragments, determine what connections there are among the discreet elements, and put everything into a temporal order. At another point, there's a dinner party at which Fuentes gives us several pages of unattributed dialog fragments:
". . . it's gong to be the most incredible deal . . ."
". . . being beaten over the head . . ."
". . . just invest a hundred million . . ."
". . . a divine Dalí . . .
". . . and get it all back in a couple of years . . ."
". . . the people from my gallery sent it . . ."
With a little work you can see the conversations coming together--the people from the gallery sending the divine Dalí, the two people (presumably men) discussing the most incredible deal in which you invest a hundred million. The dimension that can't be seen here is that many of these strands of dialog are playing off of other parts of Cruz's life that have already been narrated, meaning that we're being afforded rare insight into how Cruz is perceived by people other than himself. In the context of the book, then, it's a wonderful technique skillfully employed, and, again, the reader is forced to determine what exactly is being said, what it refers to, and what it means.
This is more than just difficulty for difficulty's sake. Cruz's life was largely predicated on illusion and deception, not letting the right hand know what the left was doing. The text's difficult mimics the mind of a man conditioned by a lifetime of speaking in riddles. Moreover, as the head of a powerful Mexican newspaper, Cruz was in charge of seeing that the right messages got distributed, and for this he would have had to have used certain codewords and -phrases, items that some savvy politicos would have understood clearly, other citizens somewhat, and some not at all. We're in a similar position, learning how to read the oblique phrases that make up this book just as one of Cruz's readers might have learned to read his newspapers.
In a similar way, the narrative's obscure nature embodies Cruz's--and everybody else's--uncertainty about exactly what the signal events from their lives truly mean. At times Fuentes enters the consciousness of other characters, meaning that Cruz himself is trying to imagine what the people closest to him might have been thinking at certain points in their lives. The fundamental uncertainty that we feel at many points throughout the book brings us closer to what Cruz feels as he tries to imagine his way into the heads of people living as many as 60 years ago. Moreover, as Cruz recalls the major points of his life, he can choose to assign a meaning to any one event, but, as Fuentes makes clear, he's far from being sure that the meaning he has chosen is "correct"; this uncertainty--is it a white vase or two black faces?--is echoed in how we often can't say exactly who is speaking a particular line of dialog or what they mean by it.
Thus, The Death of Artemio Cruz is a book whose difficulty is central to its nature; a book that wears its difficulty on its sleeve. This is quite the opposite of Bolaño's own entry into the politically motivated deathbed confession genre, By Night in Chile.
By contrast to Cruz, Chile doesn't really give us any stylistic fireworks. You won't find a line of unattributed dialog, any parallel narration, any Fuentesesque uncertainty. Stylistically speaking, there's little here to make you think Bolaño is doing anything new or different.
And yet, By Night in Chile makes you work just as hard to create meaning as does Cruz, but in a different way. Chile can best be understood as a series of stories from the life of its narrator, Urrutia Lacroix, that are being told to us one after another. For instance, we hear about the time Lacroix was invited to the home of the literary critic Farewell, the time he traveled to Europe to see how the churches there prevented natural decay, the time he tutored Pinochet et al. in Marxism. This goes on and on until the novel ends.
Each of these stories has a clear first meaning, but each also conveys the sensation that the first meaning is not the final one, or even the best. (This is a sensation that Bolaño was a master at leaving a reader with, as he consistently does it throughout all his translated works and, I suspect, the untranslated ones as well.) The reader is forced to figure out exactly what each of these stories is saying, and determine how they relate to one another to create overall meaning. (For one reading, see my essay on By Night in Chile.)
The opposite of Fuentes's style, Bolaño's is very easy to read quickly, and Chile's short length make it a book you can take on in an afternoon. Yet you will be reading Bolaño's text again and again, as interpretations can hinge on a word of Bolaño's sparse prose, and the closer one looks at what he says, the harder it is to determine exactly what it means.
The uncertainty over what these stories mean leads to similar kind of uncertainty for Lacroix that we felt for Cruz (even though the meanings of Cruz's stories are much less uncertain). In the end, we ask the same questions about each man: Was he a coward or a pragmatist? Did he commit crimes or just get caught up in events? And if the former, was there ever a point at which he could have redeemed himself?
Yet Bolaño's uncertainty also works in a way different than Fuentes's. Whereas the stories told by Fuentes's narrator are anchored in the past and come across as firm and concrete, the stories told by Bolaño's narrator are sufficiently disconnected from any definite historical moment to come across almost like parables, sort of how the adventures of a Murakami narrator--occurring in an airy postmodern nowhere-in-particular--feel. As such, Lacroix's stories easily accumulate meaning--first they are just an episode from his life, but then you look at them again and they are about the literary avant-garde, and then about fascism penetrating South America, and then about the coup against Allende, and then about why some people choose to look terror in the face while others turn away.
This is what makes the narratives in By Nigh tin Chile difficult to interpret. We are not dealing with the clear, delimited stories found in Cruz, but with stories exhibiting a surplus of meaning, spilling over their boundaries, making you assign multiple interpretations yet still feeling that there is just a tiny bit you're missing out on.
In some ways it's not surprising the Bolaño and Fuentes wrote such similar books. At times it seems like the deathbed confession is a technique made just for Latin American writers, as that continent has seen so many coups, wars, uprisings, corruption, and general bad politics that there is much to ask forgiveness for. Writers could make careers off novelizing the lives of corrupt politicos.
But Fuentes wrote The Death of Artemio Crux in 1961, whereas Bolaño wrote By Night in Chile almost 40 years later, and it's clear that the two men are writing from different places. Although both take on similar issues in a similar way, Bolaño leads his novel right up to the 1990s, after Chile has regained a democratic government. His novel is fundamentally different because he is dealing with people like Lacroix as a national legacy and not something--like Fuentes's corrupt Cruz--immediate that was being lived through as the book was written.
Perhaps for this reason, Chile is not nearly as thoroughly political as Cruz. Fuentes works hard to get as much of Mexican history and culture as possible into his novel (at times it feels like he doesn't want to leave anything important out). By contrast, Bolaño only really discusses one piece of history--the 1971 coup. Even then, this isn't done a la Fuentes; whereas the Mexican put his protagonist right into Mexican Revolution, Bolaño only deals with the coup peripherally--Lacroix rides it out safely locked in at home and reading the Greeks. Moreover, though Chile does cover complicity with the Pinochet regime, the political elements are always clearly, undeniably subordinated to the personal life of the narrator; often in Cruz it feels the opposite.
Fuentes is doing the work of rendering history as it is, giving readers an impression of what it was like to be there. By contrast, Bolaño is telling the story of history, narrating it from a very biased angle and using the arc of the story for whatever metaphorical value he can get out of it. That both men chose to put their very different wines in quite similar bottles shows the flexibility of the deathbed confession technique, how very much it can be made to contain.
It also speaks to a certain kind of pessimism common to these books, as each author positions his tale as a lamentation, a cathartic letting of emotions that hardly looks toward the future, and then with a rather ambivalent glance. Latin American authors certainly don't have a monopoly on pessimism, but the pessimism expressed by writers from other parts of the world doesn't show such interest in this form that is seemingly so popular among the Latinos. Without reducing their novels to history told as fiction, Fuentes, Bolaño, and other Latin American writers seem clearly affected by their nation's past.
